Center for Contemporary Art "Ancient Baths"/"Bania
Starinna", Plovdiv, Bulgaria and two further locations in town: billboard
at the corner Blvd “6-i septemvri”/Main Street; installations in the
main hall of the central train station.

Ladies and Gentlemen, dear guests, dear friends, dear colleagues,

I have the pleasure today, as the curator of this project, together with
the organizer, the Art Today Association, to invite you to the Center
of Contemporary Art in the “Ancient Baths” in Plovdiv, and welcome
you to our new project “Critique of Pure Image – Between Fake and
Quotation,” the first edition of the “International Project of High and
Low Technics in Contemporary Media Art.” To enjoy and celebrate
with us the opening, as well as all other parts of this event – likely
the largest international event in the field of contemporary art in
the Bulgarian art scene, with an international exhibition and series
of performances with 30 participating artists and collectives whose
work corresponds with the topic, a theoretical symposium with 18
lectures opening up a space for debate and critical exploration, and
an intervention in the urban space with an openair screening of a
selection of short movies on the main pedestrian street in Plovdiv.
All three parts of the project are equally important and present three
diff erent approaches to the topic. I’d like to emphasize that despite
its large format, it is not a festival, and it is not its aim to fulfill any
representative function.

As so often when artists from the West present their art in the
East or vice versa, you may well have a question on the tip of your
tongue: What is the context? or: What happens to art when it’s
extracted from its original context?

Rather than re-contextualizing, unifying and standardizing,
let’s try this time to play with the contexts and the contentions of
interpretation. Believe me, it can be extremely cool, and great fun to
identify oneself in multiplicity and difference.

While the West can afford a multiplicity of contexts, adopt the
exotic and diverse and wrap them up in a universalist structure, the
East is characterized by a radical lack of context. Or rather, contexts
abound, but they lack a common denominator to unify them, make
them comparable.

And yet: Globalization has changed not only the East, but also
the West. I dare say that the West has become more oriental, and the
East more occidental.

Some of you do not speak Bulgarian – especially among the
participants in the project. Others do not speak English, or German.
We all know that sometimes meaning gets lost in translation, or we
get lost in it. Therefore I’ll explain what I have in mind as carefully
as I can. Let me try! Translated to the Bulgarian political, social and
cultural context the title of the event may turn out to be difficult
to digest. In the minds of parts of the Bulgarian public or some of
the cultural institutions, it will sound like a joke. It may not be clear
whether it refers to yet another stupid talk show with a shallow
sense of humor, yet another hot journalistic reportage about trademark
counterfeits or life-threatening cheap booze. It may also sound
like part of the promise of some new political formation putting all
people back into politics. In any event, it will be recognized as something
that has come in from the outside, a strange bird, a sequence
of meaningless words like they turn up in advertising and burn
themselves in the collective consciousness.

Admittedly, the title articulates a certain element of humor,
but rather as its own armor. I’d like to convince you that the title is
quite serious, and should not get you laughing and poking fun. The
project takes a specific approach to things real. It’s about real life,
real places and real facts. And extends to a debate on the real fake.
And on how the interdependencies between these phenomena are
reflected in a meticulous critical artistic exploration. Of course, this is
the kind of event that must be positioned in the research framework
of a discursive, thematic and curatorial project, which carefully borrows
from and refers to historical sources of a European academic
tradition of critical thought.

It also presents a new picture of the development of contemporary
culture and correspondingly contemporary art, where critical
reflections and social implications are based on a new realism,
influenced by a strong collective desire of the society for immediate
consumption, in which along with everything else, wars are consumed,
and natural disasters, and scandals, and any other incident
is welcome.

We have embarked together on a dangerous adventure in
search of the projection of the real fake, the real pure image and the
truly great quotation, and how these pieces fit together to produce
reality.

Because the debate around the original and the copy has lost its
sense outside the circles of the old-fashioned elite, of private collectors
of objects and museum experts, or functionaries of the offices
for the control of trademarks.

Old masters, new masters, clichés, mechanical matrices, Andy
Warhol, Elvis Presley, political campaigns, preservatives and coloring
for fast food, which help it become healthy, palatable and authentic
in appearance. The model fakes in the biotechnics debate around
the authenticity of the visual simulations of the DNA links with their
excessive aestheticism, or the artifi cial nature of the computer-based
animated presentations of microelements in human biology and
physiology, of online games, of reality TV programs like the hugely
popular show “Big Brother.”

As a consequence of globalization, the appearance of digital
technics, and <Documenta X> 1998 in Kassel, the arts officially
announced their new object to be “Politics/Poetics.” Once more art
is called upon to fulfill a historical function in society, related to the
idea not only of technical, but also of general human progress.
The critical refl ections on this process continuously change
the terminology of art. It is not only the system of concepts that
changes, but the very object of art, pertaining to a decidedly European,
humanist tradition in art – life, or nature. With the emergence
of digital technics in art, contrary to the initial expectation that
virtual cyberworlds would be created, it turned out that the interest
was rather directed towards more nature. Towards even more
genuineness and authenticity. This changes not only the design of
the urban space, but fundamentally the concepts related to this notion.
The “desert becomes more desert,” the “village more rural,” the
“mountain more mountainous,” the “wrestlers more wrestly,” and the
poor become aestheticizedly poor. What does this do to our perception
of the global and the local, and where do we find ourselves on
a personal level?

And this is where the need for critique arises. I suggest, following
the arguments of Kant, and after him Foucault, to use our reason
in debating the idea of human progress in contemporary media art:
“Kant in fact describes Enlightenment as the moment when
humanity is going to put its own reason to use, without subjecting
itself to any authority; now it is precisely at this moment that the
critique is necessary, since its role is that of defining the conditions
under which the use of reason is legitimate in order to determine
what can be known, what must be done, and what may be hoped.”
– Michel Foucault, What Is Enlightenment?

I propose to use the term “critique” in the historical sense of
the critical method used by Kant in order to establish the principles
of metaphysical knowledge of the nature of the human being, in
which it is not our knowledge that conforms to the things, but they
conform to it.

Based on a curatorial selection, the exhibition and the series of
performances of individual artists and collectives present authors
coming from diff erent disciplines, about whose art one can say that
it has spilled over the bounds of the idea of art and its own possibilities.
In other words, it has overcome the limits of the nature of art.
With the new tools, between narrative, functional and documentary
strategies, the artistic practices transform themselves into utopian
landscapes or radical cultural and social territories. That’s why I can
claim that not only the tools have changed. It’s also the archetype
of the contemporary artist that has changed. The contemporary
artist successfully moves between the roles of a DJ, a priest, a social
worker, a manager of a transnational corporation, a barman, a construction
worker, a genetic engineer or leader of a political party.
This is one of the arguments why a part of the exhibition has
been moved to a billboard in the public urban space, another to
squat the electronic advertising panel in the main hall of the central
train station. In parallel, there will be a show – a selection of short
movies will be presented in an openair screening on the central
square of Plovdiv. Of course this breaking out of the gallery space,
this intervention in public space, does not go without a risk. It may
turn out that the cozy codes of the art context lose their relevance,
and the void is filled by the less well-defined codes of the public
space. But let’s enjoy! Plovdiv can be just as groovy a place for contemporary
art as Sofia, Venice or New York.

Dimitrina Sevova – curator of the project

& the team of the Art Today Association

We thank our sponsors for their kind support in realizing this
project:

SDC / Swiss Cultural Programme Bulgaria; Pro Helvetia; Goethe Institut,
Sofia; Stiftung “Begegnungsstätte des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt”;
Austrian Embassy in Sofia; National Fund “Culture”; Victoria Group
Hotels & Resorts; Hotel Maritza; Municipality of Plovdiv
Special thanks to all participants for their contributions on all levels
and their confi dence in the project, to Lilian Räber for her special
support, to Sabina Baumann for her drawing that became the
mascot of the project, to Alain Kessi for moral and all-round support,
and to Emil Miraztchiev for having the guts to invite me to curate
this project.

Dimitrina Sevova is an independent curator, theorist and artist, born
1971 in Varna, Bulgaria, graduated from the National Academy of
Arts in Sofia 1997. Based in Zurich, Switzerland since 2002.